‘I can put you to death this hour!’ Dionysius roared.
‘And take the consequences,’ Satyrus said. Nestor’s hand was on the collar of his cloak, and Nestor was pinning his sword expertly against his side, but Satyrus didn’t struggle. There was no point. The dice were spinning, bouncing – the moments before they stopped – is that a six? A one?
‘This town has never fallen to assault,’ Dionysius said, but there was hesitation in his voice.
Satyrus kept his eyes on the tyrant. ‘And it need never. If you support me now – just with your harbour, and you can pretend that I forced your hand – I will be your loyal ally for ever. Refuse me – and you may as well kill me.’
‘Your naked threat is an ugly weapon,’ Dionysius said. ‘Sometimes the ugly is the beautiful,’ Satyrus said.
Dionysius laughed. He laughed so hard that his bed-frame shook. Nestor let go of Satyrus’s cloak and stepped away.
The fat man laughed, and laughed, and then he drank some wine. ‘I lay here, on this very couch, and listened to you announce that you would make yourself king,’ he said. ‘And Eumeles is a threat to me and to every city on the south coast. Do you actually have Demostrate?’
‘I do, my lord.’ Satyrus nodded.
Dionysius nodded, his chins still quivering. ‘You have wit, lad. But I’m not sure I believe that you have an army.’
Satyrus had nothing to lose. ‘Amastris? You said you had a letter for me?’
Amastris stepped past Nestor. ‘You will help him?’ she asked her uncle. She sat on his couch and ruffled his hair – an oddly ugly gesture. Then she sent a slave for the letter. Time passed slowly. Satyrus had time to review all the other options he had had. And then the local helot came running back down the hall, her bare feet a whisper on the stone floors. She bowed to the tyrant, who waved his hand.
And she handed Dionysius the tablets.
The tyrant opened them – a two-fold tablet, with wax inserts on each side, four pages in all. The wax was inscribed, and he cast his eyes over it. ‘“Amion, merchant of Babylon, sends word to Satyrus, merchant of Alexandria, that he will send the Lady Amastris the required perfumes, and further stipulates against future payment . . .”’ Dionysius looked up. ‘I fear you will insist that this is a code.’
Satyrus shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘If you will permit me?’ He reached out, and Nestor took the tablets from his master and put them in Satyrus’s hand. Satyrus got a twinge from the bruise where one of the arrows had struck his breastplate. Then he had the tablets. He flexed the light wood between his hands, and popped the wax pages, one by one, from their frames.
And there was writing, small writing, covering the revealed wood. Satyrus sighed, and it seemed as if every muscle in his body relaxed. He handed the waxless boards back to Nestor, who passed them to the tyrant.
‘You are full of surprises,’ Dionysius said. He nodded. ‘“Diodorus to Satyrus, greetings. Ares and Athena bless your enterprise – I received your message today, less than a week after Seleucus paid us off for the winter. As soon as the men are sober, I will march. I will come up the royal road as far as I may, and then by the old road to Heraklea. Expect me as soon as the passes are clear. Sitalkes and Crax and all our friends speak of nothing now but our return from exile, and all of the omens are favourable.”’ Dionysius raised his eyes. ‘Of course, you might have planted this.’
Satyrus nodded. ‘I might, at that.’
‘Bah – I cannot bear to execute him. And as he says himself, that is the only other choice.’ Dionysius nodded. ‘Nice trick with the boards, young man. From Herodotus, I believe. But – very well. I don’t care to face a siege from the age’s finest captain. I will be your ally. But – if you fail, boy – don’t come back here.’
Satyrus bowed again. He thought of the state of his treasury and the thin balance of good will in his fleet. ‘If I fail,’ he said, and the mask finally slipped, and his voice trembled, ‘if I fail, lord, I will feed the fishes.’
Dionysius pursed his lips and drank some wine. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘So we understand each other.’
M
elitta put her little army in motion while the steppe was still frozen. The winter wind continued to blow, although it was becoming warmer every day and the sun shone longer, and the shadows along the riverbanks grew shorter and smaller. Deer began to move. It was a matter of a week or two until the ground became a sea of mud.
It was her second great gamble, and her second demand that her captains trust her. This time, after one brief speech, they obeyed. It was that easy.
The Grass Cats and the Cruel Hands came in by the hundred, led by the best armoured knights, the richest clan warriors, some owning three or four hundred animals, and their wagons rolled along at the tail of their columns. Young women, bundled in furs to the eyes, rode on the flanks, eyes alert for wolves, because the horses were thin and slow after a long winter on the sea of grass – now the sea of snow.
‘There will be grain aplenty in the valley of the Tanais,’ Melitta said. ‘And when Upazan’s riders come, we’ll meet them horse to horse.’
Eumenes shook his head. ‘I can possibly have the Olbians together to march before the feast of Athena,’ he said. ‘Even then, I’d be taking farmers away from their planting.’
Melitta nodded. ‘I wish I knew where my brother was,’ she said. ‘And what he planned. But in this, my heart tells me that speed is everything.’ She tried not to admit, even to herself, that she held Gardan and Methene in her heart – and all the farmers.
Coenus, at least, was solidly behind her. ‘With your permission,’ he said, ‘I’ll take a few of Ataelus’s scouts and ride ahead. I fancy that I can find Temerix. And I think we need him.’
Ataelus nodded. ‘Better I go too,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘Temerix and I for friends – for fighting Upazan, many years. Eh?’
Coenus grinned. ‘Like old times.’
‘Raise your hoplites in the spring, when the seed is in the ground,’ Melitta said.
‘The campaign may be over by then,’ Eumenes said.
Urvara hugged him. ‘You are still a young man in your heart, my love. Listen – if we go east, fast as the wind, we will still have to fight Upazan – and then Eumeles. Yes?’
Eumenes nodded.
Coenus rubbed his chin. ‘Eumenes – how powerful is Olbia these days?’
Eumenes spread his hands. ‘I’ve been archon for a winter,’ he said. ‘I imagine we can marshal three thousand hoplites and as many
psiloi
.’
‘And for ships?’ Coenus asked.
‘Eumeles has forbidden us to have a fleet,’ Eumenes said. ‘So – nothing but a dozen merchant triremes that could be refitted for war.’
Coenus nodded. ‘Let me put an idea in your ear,’ he said. ‘We both know that Satyrus will not sit idle. He’ll raise a fleet.’
Nihmu agreed. ‘He loves the sea.’
Parshtaevalt made a motion of disgust. ‘But it is true,’ he said. ‘My daughter and her war party found him far down the Bay of Trout, with a ship.’ He smiled. ‘He made a spear-girl pregnant.’
Melitta blushed for her brother. ‘Yes, he loves the sea,’ she said. ‘Coenus, what is on your mind?’
Coenus laughed. ‘Listen to me, the great strategos. Nonetheless – as soon as Eumeles hears of Satyrus’s fleet, he’ll have to go and face it.’
Urvara nodded. ‘Fleets are like armies that way,’ she said.
Coenus shrugged. ‘So you take every man in Olbia and make a grab for Pantecapaeum,’ he said.
Urvara gasped at the boldness, and Eumenes clasped his former phylarch’s hand. ‘You are a great man, and when Melitta makes you the strategos of all her armies, I hope you remember the little people.’ He laughed. ‘The risk would be immense,’ he said. ‘But the gain . . .’
‘By all the gods,’ Ataelus said in Greek. He laughed. ‘Imagine Eumeles for waking up – for finding no kingdom he is having?’ The Sakje chief roared. ‘Maybe I’m for staying here, sailing on a ship for Pantecapaeum.’ His face grew still. In Sakje, he said. ‘But no – I will go where I may find the man himself.’
‘Eumeles?’ Melitta asked.
‘I will kill him,’ Ataelus said. ‘I was there when he betrayed your mother.’
‘I know,’ Melitta said. ‘But your arrow will have to race mine.’
The first two days away from the Borysthenes were the worst, because the weather away from the great river was colder and harsher, and the animals suffered. After the second night, she rode out with Scopasis in the morning and saw rows of dead horses, older beasts who had perished at their pickets in the freezing rain, and others too sluggish to move with them.
The people were pragmatists. They butchered the dying horses and carried the meat, steaming, on the rumps of their horses. Then they moved on, at times riding with their heads down, directly into the ferocious winds of the central plains.
‘Fucking wind comes from Hyrkania!’ Parshtaevalt yelled.
‘Bactria!’ Nihmu called back.
Melitta felt dwarfed by the size of her responsibilities – and by the stature of her ‘subjects’. Every one of her chiefs had served her mother and father – had ridden east to fight Iskander, had ridden at the Ford of the River God. And she – half their age, veteran of one great battle – was expected to
lead
them.
On the third day, Marthax’s war leaders joined them. She had left them at his camp, with a promise of future obedience, but she had never expected them to come so swiftly. Graethe, now chief of the Standing Horses, rode to her and made the sign of submission, and she took his hands between hers – warm hands – and he swore by the three great Sakje gods to be her man.
‘The baqca says that you ride straight to war,’ he said. His beard was full of snow, but under the snow there was as much white as black. She could remember him as Marthax’s emissary to her mother – a loud young man, capable of violence.
‘The baqca is correct,’ she said. ‘I go to drive Upazan from the Tanais.’
‘Good!’ Graethe said. ‘You promised Marthax a kurgan.’
‘We will build to the skies,’ she promised. ‘When Upazan is driven from the mouth of the Tanais.’
‘We have brought him,’ Graethe said. He pointed at a travois, dragged by two tired horses.
She looked at the frozen blood on the hides, but there was nothing to be seen of the dead king except a corpse-shaped bundle of furs.
They rode east, across the rising ground, and back to the coast at Hygreis, the first town of Srayanka’s eastern kingdom that had been.
The Maeotae greeted them with open arms. Her outriders paid hard gold for grain and she camped for two days. The weather was milder on the shores of the Bay of Salmon.
‘The world will be mud in ten days. Or less,’ Urvara said.
Melitta nodded, sitting her horse on the high dunes north of the town. ‘I know, lady. But from here, we could ride the dunes and the hard sand all the way home.’
Urvara laughed. ‘Too easily, I forget that you grew up here. With your foreign words and your face, I forget that you really are one of us. Ride the dunes! The sea road. Inland clans like mine forget these things.’
‘I am not the first lord of ten thousand horses to launch an early campaign,’ Melitta said.
Parshtaevalt laughed. ‘No, you are not. In fact, Satrax did the same to the Getae, with your father holding his hand – after the Getae did the same to us. Oh, how they burned us! We fought that whole war before the grain came in.’
Melitta nodded. ‘Four days to Tanais.’
Urvara’s horse began to shy at the smell on the wind – roast pork. ‘Then?’
Parshtaevalt shook his head at Urvara. ‘What do you think? Then we fight.’
Melitta shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. It will take another ten days of sunshine to make the grass dry enough to ride – maybe twenty. We will build a kurgan for Marthax – next to my father’s. And a fortified camp – a base. Food, grain, shelter.’
Graethe laughed. ‘The Sakje don’t need a shelter,’ he said. ‘We have four thousand riders. Twenty thousand horses. In less than a month our horses will be fat.’
Melitta shook her head. ‘This will not be a war like any other the Sakje have fought,’ she said. ‘I am young, but I remember that in my youth, my mother alone could lead five thousand riders into the field. Now the whole fighting strength of the royal Sakje – the keepers of
the western gate – is ten thousand horsemen. How many Sauromatae are there?’
‘Too many,’ Urvara said. ‘I already miss Ataelus.’
‘He’ll meet us at Tanais,’ Melitta said.
Urvara said nothing.
Tanais had stood on a bluff above the river. In her youth, Melitta remembered the hippodrome and the temples – a beautiful marble temple in the Ionian style, dedicated to Athena Nike by her father’s friends and Uncle Leon, who had paid for most of it. She remembered the buildings laid out in a neat grid, new and clean, and a statue of her father mounted on a horse, cast in bronze, his sword pointing east at the lands where they had fought Iskander.
It was all gone. The pedestal of the statue – a big marble plinth with scenes from the battles in the east carved around the base – still sat alone at the top of the bluff, but mud and snow covered the scars of burning, and the statue itself was now armour and arrowheads and a thousand other bronze implements.
She sat on Gryphon, his feet planted in the midst of the ruin of her childhood, and all the dreams her parents had shared, and she wept. In some complex way, she hadn’t quite believed that Tanais was destroyed until she saw it. She realized that she had awakened that morning, eager to ride, expecting – what? Expecting to find the old freedman in the hippodrome? Bion waiting in his stall?
In a way, it made her job easier. She didn’t hesitate to order the top of the bluff scraped clean. The plinth from her father’s statue went into the wall that her Sakje constructed, aided by the farmers of the surrounding country. They came in with their grain within hours. She had them build her a granary in the Sindi way – they burned a huge fire to thaw the ground, and then dug the dirt out, digging down many times the height of a man and lining the pit with stones. Then they covered it with a thatch roof, supported by beams floated down the river.
As the Sindi and the Maeotae worked, the Sakje built another great fire on the shore. When the embers began to cool, they dug a tomb chamber deep into the dry dirt, and more logs went into a wooden house in the dirt. They laid Marthax in the house and killed a hundred horses in the trench outside. Every man and woman brought a square
of turf, and many of the Sindi and the Maeotae came as well, and the kurgan went up and up.
They had been ten days at Tanais when Ataelus rode in with a hundred riders at his back, and four hundred grim-faced men on ponies with bows and axes. They had Sauromatae ponies and Sauromatae coats of hide, and they sang as they came.
The Maeotae farmers came out to line the roads to greet them. The roads were swampy, and women cursed the cold mud on their legs, but they cheered as Ataelus rode by.
Ataelus dismounted by Melitta and embraced her. ‘You remember Temerix?’ he asked.
Temerix was the same – a figure of menace. He was older but no smaller. He had a new scar on his face. ‘I hear you cut a path to us,’ the smith said. ‘I was behind you two days – they were too thick, and I had to ride away.’ He laughed, and it was a fell sound. ‘But I raised the northern valleys,’ he said. He pointed at the men behind him. ‘Upazan’s tax collectors won’t be riding home.’
‘And – Lu?’ Melitta asked. Lu was another fixture from her childhood – her nurse, her confidante. Temerix’s wife from far to the east.
‘Lu sends her love,’ Temerix said. ‘Love’ sounded odd in his mouth. But he smiled, and years fled from his face. ‘By all the gods, Srayanka’s daughter, we will have good times now.’
Melitta hugged Ataelus again. ‘I worried you were gone so long,’ she said.
‘Upazan’s men were already in the high ground when I found the smith,’ he said. ‘They thought that we had fled! Hah! The ground is strewn with corpses.’ He looked to the side. ‘Coenus is wounded.’
‘That is hard news. He is – the captain of my guard.’ She almost said
the man I trust the most.
‘He is forming the men of the upper Tanais into a militia,’ Ataelus said in Sakje. ‘The wound is not so bad.’
Melitta chewed on her hair. ‘We have a secure base, and grain,’ she said. ‘As soon as the ground is dry, let us ride up the valley and see what Upazan has.’ In private, she worried that Ataelus, Temerix and Coenus had shown her power to Upazan too early.
Ten days of spring breezes. Ten days of watching farmers scratch their heads, of watching the more daring lead their oxen into the fields and
all but vanish in the rich, black mud, the great beasts scarcely able to walk for the clods adhering like melted cheese to their hooves.
Even when many of the farmers began to plough in earnest, breaking the new soil once, and then again, and a third and even a fourth time before planting their seed, still she waited, because Ataelus was tireless, and Samahe rode the hills with her maidens, and spring came slowly there.
In the valleys, girls danced the spring dances under the trees, and seeds were planted that needed no dirt to grow, and laughter filled the air as the first green shoots leaped from the ground as an answer to Demeter’s prayer and Persephone’s return. Melitta, who had not thought about sex in five months, felt the pangs of interest, first in one boy, then in another, until the urge of spring was so powerful that she took refuge in being the queen. She began to dress the part, and she put her bodyguard and Urvara, who was in most ways her first minister, between her yearnings and her body.